On June 30th, IBM released two different news announcing one the availability of its open cloud development platform as a service Bluemix, the other revealing the opening of the new SoftLayer datacenter in London.
Bigblue’s PaaS offering Bluemix started in February as beta and it is already among the distinguished cloud foundry deployments, the solution is built from open standards and it allows providers to develop and distribute cloud oriented applications using a combination of IBM’s middleware software with other open services and tools from their partners ecosystem.
IBM also announced that Bluemix has about 50 services available to allow developers to create cloud based business applications. Bluemix is part of a $ 1 billion investment in cloud computing and it runs on the SoftLayer infrastructure, IBM acquired SoftLayer last year to extend its IBM SmartCloud Service porfolio.
The opening of the new IBM SoftLayer DataCentre in London, announced it as the latest of the new 15 data centres that IBM planned to open as part of a $1.2 billion dollar investment to help the spread of cloud services. It is important to notice that even in the world of cloud computing the location of the workload has its relevance because many countries have regulations to be complied with and they need to meet in-country data residency requirements. The new DataCentre in London is going to complement the existing datacentres in Amsterdam and London network Point of Presence (PoP) and it will also contribute to help customers with SoftLayer services.